UC San Diego to Develop Cyberinfrastructure for NASA’s ICESat-2 Data

Mar 7, 2017

SDSC’s OpenTopography Project Serving as Model

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego have been awarded a NASA ACCESS grant to develop a cyberinfrastructure platform for discovery, access, and visualization of data from NASA’s ICESat and upcoming ICESat-2 laser altimeter missions.

ICESat and ICESat-2 (scheduled for launch in 2018) measure changes in the volume of Earth’s ice sheets, sea-ice thickness, sea-level height, the structure of forest and brushland canopies, and the distribution of clouds and aerosols.

The new project, dubbed “OpenAltimetry” (www.openaltimetry.org), will build upon technology that SDSC developed for its NSF-funded OpenTopography facility, which provides web-based access to high-resolution topographic data and processing tools for a broad spectrum of research communities.